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Rapt By Winifred Gallagher. Penguin Press, 244 pp., $25.95.
We almost can't help but pay attention to attention these days.
The topic hovers whenever you glance at a computer screen, startle at assorted cell-phone ring tones or zone out at business meetings. It's there when you puzzle over which of 500 cable channels to watch, too.
"Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life," the latest book from Winifred Gallagher, brings a sharp critique to technological distractions. The science writer suggests all the proliferation of gadgets might cripple our powers of concentration, as everyone, especially the young, puts a premium on multitasking.
One of Gallagher's central points is that what people refer to as their life experiences actually equals the memory of what they paid attention to each day. It's a notion she borrows from William James, the American philosopher and psychologist who died 99 years ago.
"Rapt" begins with James' famous assertion: "My experience is what I agree to attend to," and brings that epigram into clear focus through a tour of psychological and neuro-scientific studies, illustrated with cogent anecdotes. Gallagher shows how zooming in on even the narrowest tableaus is what makes us human - and distinctive from one another. Rich in research but simply expressed, "Rapt" lets the reader glean valuable insights, too. If a sour outlook could be the result of what a person notices and attends to, then, willful creatures that we are, most of us have the power to shift our focus - perhaps to something brighter.
"Rapt" outlines the science showing that "what you pay attention to, and how, can actually change your brain and thus your behavior." And Gallagher argues that this research - conducted at Harvard, the universities of Pennsylvania and Oregon and other centers - demonstrates how, "like physical fitness, the mental sort that sustains the focused life can be cultivated."...